New UK Porn Law

[AndyR]

This was mentioned last year and has only now just surfaced read about it here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... sses.html
Apparently this comes into effect in April 2018
Now I am not sure if this only affects UK based sites or anyone that receives traffic from the UK but since Mindgeek is complying with the new law I would assume so, unless they have some other motive for the compliance.

After speaking to one guy in the business he thought that it would not apply to affiliated websites, I tend to differ since there is explicit content even on affiliated sites and this is what the law is about.

My question is does anyone have more information about this law ?

[TheButcher]

I doubt the law, actually I am pretty certain it applies to all websites not just sponsors and affiliate sites. Going to have to do some digging around on this one.

[bill]

i thought mindgeek already had a monopoly on british age id proof

https://news.sky.com/story/porn-watcher ... s-11224093

[AndyR]

Far as I know they built that system a while back just not fully implemented it on their own sites as yet... that's just an assumption.

I am still not clear on weather this law just applies to UK based sites or UK traffic going to say the USA as well ?

[HeidiHoe]

The way I understand this it affects anyone getting visitors from the UK. Come April I just might block UK traffic. Fuck it. My guess is these punters will still visit the sites... using VPN. And I'm guessing this won't affect sites like Twitter... even so there's more smut on Twitter than there's on a lot of porn sites! Another half-baked fucked up law to contend with!

[AndyR]

That is the way I am reading it also and one of my possible solutions was to just block the UK also as a last resort however after looking closely about 30% of my sales are from the UK so it's a sizeable chunk.
Pretty sure that most serious porn surfers know about using a VPN like you said so possibly blocking the UK won't really affect sales after all and just affect the free loader.
Yeah fucking Twitter gets away with too much of course it won't affect those wankers.

[TheButcher]

The way I understand this it affects anyone getting visitors from the UK. Come April I just might block UK traffic. Fuck it. My guess is these punters will still visit the sites... using VPN. And I'm guessing this won't affect sites like Twitter... even so there's more smut on Twitter than there's on a lot of porn sites! Another half-baked fucked up law to contend with!

I'll be curious to see what twitter does about UK traffic come April.

[AndyR]

The way I understand this it affects anyone getting visitors from the UK. Come April I just might block UK traffic. Fuck it. My guess is these punters will still visit the sites... using VPN. And I'm guessing this won't affect sites like Twitter... even so there's more smut on Twitter than there's on a lot of porn sites! Another half-baked fucked up law to contend with!

I'll be curious to see what twitter does about UK traffic come April.

Probably fuck all

[bucksm]

Restricting online sites no matter what is just bad for freedoms.

[HeidiHoe]

I'm thinking about giving this script a try to block UK http://www.analysespider.com/ip2country ... untry.html
Might block Russia and Ukraine as well. I see a lot of wp hack attempts from there, no sales. And maybe China.

[TheButcher]

I'm thinking about giving this script a try to block UK http://www.analysespider.com/ip2country ... untry.html
Might block Russia and Ukraine as well. I see a lot of wp hack attempts from there, no sales. And maybe China.

UK traffic has always converted well for me, the other 3 I would not care for that much.

[AndyR]

A useful link... I was using my own code similar to this a couple of years back mainly becasue I had to for the sake of the Video Secrets country ban list on a per performer basis... then decided to take it a bit further and redirect certain country's for the sake of my other sites yeah it all worked great but no matter where I pushed the traffic it never resulted in any conversions not even from VS itself so I scrapped the whole lot deeming it as being pointless.
Oddly enough I have had conversions since from the countries you mention not many but the few I got they spent quite a large sum of money and no charge backs as one would have expected.
A lot of company's say they can't process CC info for aforementioned countries but I know many of them can which leaves the question are they being processed and your not getting credit or what ? but that's another story.

[bucksm]

Mindgeek has been preparing for this for ages.

[HeidiHoe]

Mindgeek has been preparing for this for ages.

Yep... and they'll probably charge the rest of us a small fortune to use the service. Perhaps free porn has come full circle. I remember the days when nipples were blurred in tour pages. Too bad we can't turn back the clock. From what I've read only about 3% of porn surfers actually pay for porn. Percentage is probably higher for cam sites I'm guessing. Makes you wonder if paying a verification service for free sites versus blocking UK is worth it. Of course, in time more countries might jump on the bandwagon forcing some drastic changes. Having it apply only to adult commercial enterprises is BS too. Social media sites such as twitter, tumblr, etc shouldn't be let off the hook. It's crap.

Here's some more blocking resources I've found:

myipblocker.com - $24 per year for 500,000 hits per month. You just add a javascript to your header of pages where you want to block access and set the countries to block for each site in the dashboard. You can redirect blocked traffic to wherever you like.

WP plugin: IQ Block Country - uses the free MaxMind database, lets you block by country on frontend and/or different countries on backend. Added advantage is that you can reduce hack attempts. You can redirect blocked traffic to wherever you like.

I've tried both of these options and they seem to work like a charm. Looks like I'll probably use the plugin on WP sites because of the added security. I might use myblocker on my one non-WP site unless I get motivated to fiddle together the script to my liking. I might just cough up the money and use them instead. We'll see

[vblogger]

Not legal advice okay. I'm thinking they will enforce this for larger sites (read tubes) before little blogs. I have 237 blogs and the get any where from 200 to 900 hits a day each. You hear what I'm saying?